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Apps, Tools, and Gear I Use

Maxence Poutord ・ Jul 23 '19

#productivity #developertools #webdev #beginners

Honestly, I figured sharing this would be a fun trend! (Use the tag #mygear.) So, here's mine...

Hardware

• System76 Gazelle Pro (15 inch)
• Extra monitor, so I can have code or a manuscript on one screen, and research or documentation on the other.
• CODE Mechanical Keyboard, which is every bit as awesome as advertised.
• Logitech M510 Wireless Computer Mouse
• JVC HA-NC250 noise cancelling headphones. These things are great, and the detachable cord means they'll have a long life.
• TI-89 calculator -- I LOVE this thing!

As a writer, I also have The Chicago Manual of Style, The Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style close at hand. (I usually also keep a couple of programming reference books there.)

And yes, off to the left, that is a Palm Tungsten T. And it works. I sync it to my laptop with JPilot. As far as handheld devices go, it's delightfully useful and distraction free.

I don't know if it officially counts as hardware, but you can see my Doctor Hooves figurine just under my monitor. He usually just stands guard, but that's what I use when I need to do some rubber-duck debugging.

System

I work entirely on Ubuntu MATE. I organize my windows into separate workspaces to help minimize distractions.

• Guake is my main everyday-usage terminal, which I can bring up with F12
• Terminator (or occasionally cool-retro-term) for a dedicated terminal environment.
• Mycroft.ai is installed on my system for timers, reminders, and checking up on things while working.
• When I need a VPN, I use ProtonVPN. I also use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS.

IDE

I use Visual Studio Code for almost everything, and have it packed with a host of extensions for C++, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, RestructuredText, Markdown, and XML. That said, no matter what I'm working on, I use:

• Bookmarks
• Bracket Pair Colorizer
• Codealike
• Code Spell Checker
• Comment Anchors
• Contextual Duplicate
• Indent-rainbow
• Overtype
• Peacock
• Reflow Paragraph
• VSCode Great Icons
• Wakatime

I also tend to cycle through a half dozen or so themes depending on mood. Most recently, I use Sea Green Theme, LaserWave, and skGRTT.

Writing

I do almost all my writing in LibreOffice, although I sometimes fall back on Focuswriter or Visual Studio Code.

When I really want a distraction-free environment, I actually pull out my Royal Heritage manual typewriter.

Browser

I mainly use the Brave web browser, with...

• Privacy Badger (in case I need to disable the main Brave shields)
• MyWOT
• Leechblock
• Stylus

On occasion, I fall back on Firefox.

Productivity

• DuckDuckGo is my search engine all the way!
• Hexchat is my IRC client, for connecting to Freenode and OFTC.
• I use Rambox to gather all my other chat service accounts into one unified place.
• Despite a couple of pesky bugs, I use Evolution for my email, calendar, contacts, and to do list...
• Syncing to my personal Nextcloud.
• Simplenote is my favorite service for storing notes.
• Calibre for managing and reading my massive library of eBooks.

Coding

For C++, I use...

• C++17
• LLVM Clang 7
• GCC 8
• cppcheck
• CMake

For Python, I use...

• Python 3.7/3.8
• venv
• pip
• Flake8
• Mypy
• Pytest
• Bandit
• Black

And, of course, I use Git for all my VCS needs.